PRESIDENT Edgar Lungu has directed the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) to immediately review and reconstitute all Boards of its subsidiary companies to realign them with the industrialisation and job creation agenda.

Mr Lungu who is also chairman of the IDC said the boards of all subsidiaries should be aligned in line with job creation agenda as set out in the ruling Patriotic Front’s manifesto.

This is contained in a statement release to the media today by his Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations, Amos Chanda. This was after the meeting held at state House today.

Earlier, the President met Treasury and Central Bank Officials at State House to discuss the state of the Zambian economy focusing on stabilisation of the kwacha, maize marketing, energy security and options for economic diversification.

Those who attended the meeting include Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda, Secretary to the Treasury Fredson Yamba, Deputy Finance Minister Christopher Mvunga, Bank of Zambia Governor Danny Kalyalya, Deputy BOZ Governor Dr. Bwalya Ngandu and two senior economists. State House Officials who included Special Assistant to the President (Press and Public Relations) Amos Chanda, Special Assistant to the President (Economic) and Special Assistant to the President (Policy Implementation and Monitoring were also in attendance.

Below is the full statement

PRESIDENT LUNGU ON THE IDC’S INDUSTRIALIZATION AND JOB CREATION

LUSAKA, (Thursday, September 10, 2015)–Following the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC)’s assumption of shares of state-­??owned companies, His Excellency, Mr Edgar Chagwa Lungu, President of the Republic of Zambia has directed IDC to immediately review and reconstitute all the Boards of its subsidiary companies to realign them with the industrialisation and job creation agenda as set out in the ruling party’s manifesto.

The President, who is the IDC Board Chairperson, says the key objectives of the IDC as approved by the Board Meeting held today (10 th September 2015) are as follows:

1. To improve and realize value of Government investments in state-­??owned enterprises (SOEs) through improved management and strategic orientation;

2. To undertake industrialization and diversification of the economy including rural development through creation of new industries;

3. To partner with private enterprises with high growth potential thereby creating opportunities and capacity development;

4. To mitigate the financial burden of supporting SOEs away from the treasury through improved viability and sustainability;

5. To contribute towards accelerating job and wealth creation, alleviation of poverty among the people and economic growth by investment in areas and sectors where the private sector may have challenges;

6. To promote the participation of women and youths in viable green projects through strategic partnership and projects.

The Head of State says the IDC must engage its subsidiaries to align their strategic thrust and direction to Government’s Industrialization and Job Creation Agenda, monitor conformance and performance in pursuance of growth, profitability, and sustainability. This will be in addition to the need to promote sound corporate governance.

Accordingly the IDC will immediately review and reconstitute the Boards of its subsidiary companies. The IDC’s priorities and interventions will target sectors that have a comparative advantage and in which labour intensive activities can be most effectively used to expand output. The IDC Board has prioritized its interventions in the four growth sectors: Agriculture, Infrastructure, Manufacturing and Tourism.

Following the share transfer, all line ministries will now focus on policy making thereby giving IDC direct mandate and authorization on behalf of GRZ to oversee performance and accountability of these SOEs.

IDC’s oversights responsibilities include all aspects of governance, commercial, financing, operational and all matters incidental to the interests of the State as shareholder.

The Corporation is a tool to enhance domestic capital formation, wealth creation and preservation by focusing on exploiting our country’s advantages in natural resources and actively developing industries and enterprises to create jobs.

Issued by:
Amos Chanda
SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT
(PRESS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS)
STATE HOUSE

A nineteen year old Mansa teen has killed his brother who taunted him for not flushing away his waste after using the toilet.

The teen allegedly killed his brother identified as Japhet Kunda, 25, of Suburbs Township by stabbing him once through the chest with a kitchen knife.

Luapula Province Commissioner of Police Hudson Namachila who confirmed the family tragedy said the 19-year-old murder suspect has been apprehended but was currently hospitalised after an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

“The suspect is under police guard at Mansa General Hospital where he is admitted after he tried to kill himself by slitting his throat with the knife he used to kill his brother.”

The incident happened on September 9 around 17:00 hours at the home they shared with other relatives.

Preliminary information gathered by police indicated that the suspect whose name has been withheld for now, was queried by his brother as to why he had used the toilet without flushing.

This angered the younger of the two brothers who retorted that there was no running water to allow him to flush the waste away.

A war of words ensued, and the suspect got a Coca-cola bottle which he broke before assaulting the deceased with the jagged edged of the bottle.

He then left the house in a fit of anger and went to a market where he bought a knife before returning home and stabbing his brother.

Japhet was rushed to hospital and was declared dead on arrival at the hospital where his body was taken to the mortuary awaiting post-mortem.

Mr Namachila said the teen would be charged after he is discharged from hospital.

The opposition political party feels it does not make sense to wine and dine at State functions when a majority of the people in the country are struggling to survive.

UPND Deputy Spokesperson Edwin Lifwekelo has told QFM News via telephone that the party will instead engage in charity work by making donations of various goods to the underprivileged in society.

Mr. Lifwekelo says while 24th October is an important day for all Zambians, the PF has diluted the essence of celebrating it.

Meanwhile, Every Home for Christ Regional Director Richard Kakuwa says there is no need for politicians to shun Independence Day celebrations because 24th October is a national day and not a PF event.

Bishop Dr. Kakuwa says this is the time for all Zambians to show each other love.

He says the government has even done well to come up with a theme that is encouraging Zambians despite their political affiliation to reconcile and open new chapters in life.

ZESCO Limited has instituted investigation into the power blackout that was experienced at Heroes National Stadium during the game between Zambia and Gabon. ZESCO Spokesperson Henry Kapata said that there was sufficient power to light the entire stadium and surrounding areas.

Mr. Kapata said that the power outage which happened at Heroes stadium was NOT as a result of load shedding. Meanwhile, the Patriotic Front Media Committee has called on ZESCO management to fully investigate the power outage that happened last evening at Heroes Stadium during the Zambia Gabon friendly match.

Mr. Kapata said the blackout had nothing to do with load shedding as the stadium station had a capacity of 9 MVA which was eight times more than the requested for by the stadium management during construction.

“There was no load shedding and that is the reason why we have instituted an investigation on the matter, power was there but something went wrong, that is what we are investigating and you aware that the head of State was in the stadium and surroundings could not be subjected to load shedding. We are seriously investigating what went wrong at the stadium, for security purposes we cannot subject the stadium and surrounding places to load shedding.” Mr. Kapata said.

He maintained that what happened at Heroes Stadium had nothing to do with load shedding. A cross section of society has questioned the logic by Zesco to load shed the Heroes Stadium after assuring soccer funs that there would be no power cut.

Meanwhile, the Patriotic Front Media Committee has called on ZESCO management to fully investigate the power outage that happened last evening at Heroes Stadium during the Zambia Gabon friendly match.

Committee Member Benjamin Siwila says what happened at stadium was an act of sabotage.

And PF Youths in Lusaka says what happened at the stadium was a security risk especially that the Head of State was present.

Speaking on behalf of PF Youths in Lusaka, Robinson Chipili said the power outage was also unfortunate as lives of many people would have been lost had there been a stampede.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE KARIBA DAM

By Ronald Lwamba

The history of hydro-power development in Zambia cannot be told without mentioning Dr. David Livingstone. He saw the Zambezi River as “God’s Highway” to the sea but unfortunately God had other ideas. During his first journey down the Zambezi River, he came across the Falls and named them, Victoria Falls.

He also came across the Tongas whose men in those days wore no clothes at all, which he found to be indecent. “They walk about,” he wrote, “without the smallest sense of shame. . . . I told them that on my return I should have my family with me, and no one must come near us in that state.” The women wore a belt around their waist to which a great number of strings were attached to hang all round their waist, a bit like the reed dance women. These fringes were about 150 mm or 200 mm long. The younger girls had the fringes only in front.

It is therefore a misrepresentation of facts when we condemn women dressed in minis for not adhering to our culture. Which culture? The mini is more decent than what our fore fathers, or ancestors to be politically correct, wore. It would be interesting to find out if there were more rape cases. This leads me to think that rape is a state of mind because in India where women wear long dresses and sometimes even cover their faces rape cases are rampant.

After the falls he rejoined the river at Kariba Gorge but on his second journey, in 1860, he went down the valley itself with a fleet of canoes. There was so much hope placed on the Zambezi River to provide access to the sea that the German Chancellor Leo von Caprivi negotiated the acquisition of the Caprivi Strip (named after him) with the United
Kingdom in exchange for Zanzibar and another island in the North Sea in order to give Germany access to the Zambezi River and a route to Africa’s east coast, where the German colony Tanganyika was situated. Strips like these are very common in the USA and are referred to as “pan handles” because they look like pan handles.

Later on Dr Livingstone took into account the Victoria Falls and Kariba gorge on the navigability of the Zambezi River and therefore suggested to have a port for steamers near the confluence of the Zambezi and Kafue Rivers. Unfortunately the whole grand scheme collapsed in ruin and recrimination when it was discovered that the Cahora Bassa gorge in Mozambique, which Livingstone had not inspected, made God’s Highway totally unnavigable.

It is my hope that in future a canal with locks can be constructed to bypass the Cahora Bassa Dam to provide Zambia possibly with the participation of Botswana, Malawi and Zimbabwe access to the sea, whose economic impact can perhaps be comparable to the Panama Canal for the USA or the mighty Mississippi River.The question can be asked now, would Zambia have been better off having access to the sea rather than the gorges that impede navigability of the river had God been more magnanimous, some of which have been exploited for electricity? Although easy access to Zambia would have also resulted in increased slave trade during the slave trade era, I think Zambia would have been better off because it has other hydropower development options.

Serious planning for a major dam in the Zambezi Basin began in 1946 in what were then two British colonial territories. Its sole purpose was to provide electricity to the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt and the urban industrial centres of Southern Rhodesia. The mining firms had been experiencing rapid development since the end of World War II. Lack of a reliable, low cost supply of electricity was seen not only as a major impediment to further development, but as a potential energy crisis. Between 1948 and 1956 coal delivered from Wankie to the Copperbelt thermal power stations using an inadequate single-track railway line had to be supplemented by fuelwood that deforested 917 square kilometres in the surrounding areas (Williams, 1985). Energy supplies were also supplemented in 1956 by the temporarily importation of electricity from the Belgian Congo to the north – a strategy seen as only temporary because of civil strife (Soils Inc.2000). While the country was grappling with the energy crisis

Proposed Seaway

I stayed in an unlit house in Section 9 in Mufulira where my father worked for the mines run by the Rhodesia Selection Trust. It had to take another three years for my parents to move to Section 3A, “Amaiteneke” (prefabs), which was electrified.

Despite the construction of the Kariba Dam and other hydropower projects, 50 years down the line, only 48% of the urban households have electricity and a paltry 3% of the rural households are electrified.

During the 1946-53 planning period two dam sites received serious consideration. One was the Kariba Gorge in the Middle Zambezi Valley; the other was immediately upstream from the Kafue River Gorge, a Zambezi tributary entirely contained within Northern Rhodesia. Established in 1946, the Inter-Territorial Hydro-Electric Power Commission appointed an Advisory Panel in 1948 to choose between the two sites. The Panel initially favoured the Kariba Gorge dam site to which the Northern Rhodesia government (NRG) objected and asked the Panel to look more carefully at the Kafue site. Involving a smaller, less expensive dam, NRG argued that Kafue could provide the critically needed power to the Copperbelt at an earlier date than Kariba. After the Panel confirmed that Kafue could provide sufficient cheap power more rapidly than Kariba, the Northern Rhodesian settler-dominated legislature voted in 1953 to proceed with Kafue and established a Kafue River Hydroelectric Authority as the responsible agency. Unfortunately this decision was reversed because that same year the two territories were joined with Nyasaland to form the Central African Federation aka the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Though short-lived (1953 – 1963), creation of the Southern Rhodesian-dominated Federation shifted the emphasis back to Kariba since its Prime Minister favoured the Kariba dam site for political as well as economic reasons. In order to project an image of impartiality the Federal Prime Minister engaged a French consulting engineering firm headed by the renowned French civil engineer, André Coyne. Engineering and architectural design fees are based on the cost of the project. It is therefore not surprising that Monsieur Coyne recommended the much more expensive Kariba dam site which project he proceeded to design in the form of an arch dam, his speciality. In today’s language this would have been called single sourcing.

Coyne also designed the Malpasset Dam in Southern France, which failed killing an estimated 421 people. It was said that Coyne was deeply affected by the dam’s failure. He died half a year later. Thank God, we did not suffer a similar fate. The Kariba Dam site has faults. Arch dams are so sensitive to the presence of faulty zones unlike the rockfill dam constructed at Kafue Gorge. The large reservoir has also resulted in some minor earthquakes known as reservoir induced seismicity, RIS. However, that is water under the bridge.

Political differences must be cast aside when it comes to protection of the dam wall. Recently the Zimbabwean Minister of Energy and Power Development, Elton Mangoma admitted that the Kariba dam wall on the Zimbabwean side is weak and requires urgent repairs to prevent the wall from collapsing. There is also erosion in the plunge pool where the water impacts from the spillway.

During this period the Northern Rhodesian Governor requested a loan for a major rural development programme that was intended to reverse rural migration to the Copperbelt and the urban centres along the line of rail from the mining companies. Unfortunately the Federal Prime Minister also requested the mining companies to loan the Federation the necessary finance and they opted to fund the Kariba Dam project in the sum of $56 million and the mines were promised the first benefits of power from Kariba. $8.4 million came from the Commonwealth Development Finance Company, $42 million came from the Colonial Development Corporation, and, biggest of all, $80 million came from the World Bank.

Natural justice would have demanded that the power station should have been constructed on the north bank to balance the equation after having lost out on the construction of the hydropower power project on Kafue River. However, the white settlers had an inkling that the Federation would not survive and chose the south bank for a power station that was largely meant to supply the mines with electricity on the Copperbelt. This choice would later haunt independent Zambia when the then Southern Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965.

Most of the electrical and mechanical engineering contracts were given to British firms or their African subsidiaries but the main contract, the civil engineering contract comprising the building of the power station and the dam itself, was given to an Italian firm much to the consternation of the white settlers who were predominantly of British stock. It was just over ten years that the British had fought the Italians in World War II. But within a year the settlers were won over by the Italians because of the speed and skill at which the work was carried out. In addition, the Italians did not organise gangs of Africans to do heavy manual work which was the prevalent colonial custom. At Kariba, when something had to be shoved or lifted, black men and white men put their shoulders underneath it, all together, posing an unusual sight at the time. This was quicker than looking for gangs of Africans to give orders to.

Unfortunately Zambia has perpetuated the use of this colonial custom of “bakapitao.”

Nyaminyami-the River god

The two Rhodesias had different approaches on resettlement. In Southern Rhodesia the villagers were forcefully removed whereas in Northern Rhodesia it was based on persuasion until at the last minute when it became clear that persuasion had failed. The Gwembe Tonga men did not believe that it was possible for their villages to be flooded by building a dam many kilometres downstream. Even headmen who had been taken to the dam site to view construction activities could not relate them to their impending removal. There was a faceoff between the mobile police and the villagers. The police had guns while the villagers had spears, clubs and utility and ceremonial axes reminiscent of the Marikana standoff. Failing to negotiate a solution to the impasse, the governor ordered the people into the trucks. According to the available version of events, the Gwembe Tonga men charged the mobile police who, believing their lives were in danger, fired back. Eight Gwembe Tonga men were reported to have died and at least 32 were wounded.
The Tonga-mobile police standoff reminiscent of the Marikana miners-police standoff in South Africa

They also believed that Nyaminyami, their River God, would not allow them to be moved from their tribal lands and would also not allow the great Zambezi River to be blocked. They believed it would anger the river god so much that he would cause the water to boil and destroy the “white man’s bridge” with floods.

Believe it or not the floods did come. In 1957, a year into the building of the dam, the river rose to flood level, flowing through the gorge with immense power, destroying some equipment and the access roads. The odds against another flood occurring the following year were about a thousand to one – but flood it did – three metres higher than the previous year. This time destroying the access bridge, the coffer dam and parts of the main wall. Nyaminyami had made good his threat. He had recaptured the gorge. His waters passed over the wreckage of his enemies at more than sixteen million litres a second, a flood which, it had been calculated, would only happen once in ten thousand years.

After the floods, in 1959, three Italians and fourteen Africans working at the top of a shaft fell to the bottom when the staging gave way and 80 tons of concrete fell on top of them. The bodies had to be prised open with pneumatic picks after the concrete had set. Although man had eventually won the battle, like former Zambian football coach Renard would say, when the dam was finally opened in 1960, there was a whole new respect for the power of the River God, Nyaminyami.

The Queen Mother commissioned the Kariba Dam on 16th May 1960. Her visit was also extended to Lusaka where she unveiled the Rider and Horse statue and the Copperbelt as well as Western Province where she was paddled along the river in a state canoe. In Mufulira, I remember as an 11 year-old lining the main road leading to Mufulira West to welcome the Queen Mother waving a miniature union jack. We were given ice cream, my first taste of ice cream, a far cry from the way school children are treated these days when leaders tour their areas.

Ronald Lwamba has worked as a Town Engineer for the then Municipal Council of Livingstone and Zesco, initially as a Resident Engineer for Itezhitezhi rising to the post of Senior Manager, Civil Engineering where, among other things, he was in charge of the preparation of feasibility studies for hydropower projects. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering Degree (Civil) from the University of Zambia (1974), Post Graduate Diplomas in Water Resources Development (University of Roorkee, India) and Hydropower Development (University of Trondheim, Norway) and a Master of Engineering in Water Resources Development (University of Roorkee, India).
Kariba Dam wall under construction